Helen Webb Harris
Helen Webb Harris founded the Wake-Robin Golf Club in 1937. It is the United States' oldest registered African-American women's golf club.[1]
Career[edit]
Harris was an educator in the Washington, DC school system.[2]
Wake-Robin Golf Club[edit]
The first meeting of the club was held at her house with thirteen women attending.[3] The club was named after the Wake-Robin wildflower.[1]
Harris was the club's first president, and under her leadership the club joined the United Golf Association and the Eastern Golf Association.[4][5] In 1938 the club drafted and sent a petition to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes seeking to desegregate the public courses of the District of Columbia.[1] In response Ickes approved the construction of a nine-hole golf course on the site of an abandoned trash dump, called Langston Golf Course, which opened in 1939.[1]
The Wake-Robin Golf Club and the Royal Golf Club continued to pressure Secretary Ickes, and he issued an order in 1941 to open public courses to all.[1] In 1947 Harris was elected as the first female president of the Eastern Golf Association, a position which she held for two terms.[4] The Wake-Robin Golf Club was part of the movement to force the Professional Golfers Association to drop its "White-only" rule for eligibility, which it did in 1961.[1]
Some of the Wake-Robin Golf Club's records are held at Howard University.[1][5]
Recognition[edit]
In 1973 Harris was inducted into the National Afro‐American Golfers Hall of Fame.[5]
The Helen Webb Harris Scholarship Fund was established in 2007.[2]
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d e f g "African American Golfer's Digest - News, Information & Activities in the 'Soulful' World of Golf". Africanamericangolfersdigest.com. Retrieved 2015-03-20.
- ^ a b M. Mikell Johnson Ph. D. (2010). Heroines of African American Golf. Trafford Publishing. pp. 1913–. ISBN 978-1-4269-3419-3.
- ^ "The Wake Robin Golf Club founded | African American Registry". Aaregistry.org. 1936-08-06. Retrieved 2015-03-20.
- ^ a b Marvin P. Dawkins; Graham Charles Kinloch (1 January 2000). African American Golfers During the Jim Crow Era. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 32–. ISBN 978-0-275-95940-1.
- ^ a b c "The African American Experience". Testaae.greenwood.com. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 2015-03-20.